by Giuliano Danieli
The following essay is taken from the column within Calibano #0 – Aida/Blackface, the cultural in-depth magazine of the Rome Opera House
On the relationship between musical events and talks or practices related to the idea of race, numerous studies have been published in recent decades, especially in the Anglo-American academic circles. The influential collection of essays, Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) edited by the ethnomusicologists Ronald M. Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, explores the subject through a wide range of case studies from multiple perspectives ( e.g. the interconnection between race, body and dance; the relation between nationalism, ethnic identity and hybridism; the presence of racial influences in music historiography; and the representation of the “Other” in music). Yet, if one looks at the written works on opera, at academic level, it is impossible not to notice the contradiction that it is still difficult to identify very clearly the urgency of discussing the problem of race, even though the issues of “opera and race” permeate the repertoire and the practice of doing musical theatre today, as some of the contributions in this issue of Calibano indicate. This contradiction is all the more surprising considering the number of operatic titles, even very famous ones, in which the often stereotyped and demeaning portrayal of non-white characters ( therefore not necessarily Black) is central. These works range from Gioachino Rossini’s (1816) and Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello (1887) to Aida (1871), from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791) to Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine (1865), from Georges Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles (1863) to Arthur Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885), and include also many 20th century and contemporary operas.
Recently, two comprehensive volumes have made a successful attempt to fill the gap in musicology on this subject. Blackness in Opera, edited by Naomi André, Karen M. Bryan and Eric Saylor (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2012), is a collection of essays which not only analyse the ways in which composers, librettists and performers from different periods have portrayed black characters, but also discuss the ways in which certain operas and certain production conventions of the past are perceived today. Some of these productions are enriched with new meanings and sensibilities, while sometimes others are criticised and even changed. The merit of this work is that it confronts us with an unusual number of topics: one interesting chapter is dedicated to The Masque of Blackness, an English masque (thus not exactly an opera, but nevertheless a genre of theatre which includes song and dance) from 1605, in which Queen Anne and her ladies of the court acted, in blackface makeup, reproducing a group of primordial creatures ‘bleached’ by the “civilising light” of Albion – a metaphor for the power of the English monarchy, with clear racist overtones. Other contributions concern better-known operas, such as Aida, of which a new reading is offered ( quoted in this volume by Neelam Srivastava) which adds further contributions to Edward Said’s East/West dichotomy, and gives an account of the intertwining of Egypt’s expansionist policies of the second half of the 19th century and a ‘second-tier’ Orientalism, which was a specific reference to the African continent (Egypt vs. Black Africa). Finally, a series of essays deals with works that fall outside the usual repertoire: Frederick Delius’s Koanga (1904), an opera set on Louisiana plantations , full of reminiscences of Afro-American folk songs, yet set within a dramaturgical and musical framework that is otherwise totally unrelated to, if not opposed to, Black culture; Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf (1927), which features a Black violinist in a jazz band; and works composed and performed by non-white artists, such as Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha (1911), Ouanga! by Clarence Cameron White (1932) and Blue Steel by William Graham Still (1934).
What looks like a follow up of this editorial line is the monograph Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement by Naomi André (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2018), whose title clearly sums up the aims of the research, which is to provide a study of the links between opera and blackness, tracing a parallel history of musical theatre (especially in America and South Africa) that gives adequate prominence to the contribution of Black composers, librettists, singers and audiences. It is a volume which explores the historically deep-rooted power imbalances in the world of opera between whites and Blacks, but also ascertain how the increasing presence of artists and people of colour at the opera has contributed and is further contributing to a growing emancipation and ’empowerment’ of non-whites, even outside the musical theatres. This is a clear effort to come up with a study that speaks of the present rather than the past (hence the notion of “engaged musicology”, which can be translated as “socially committed” musicology), exploring the meanings (especially in terms of political and racial relations) that nowadays opera has taken on for contemporary audiences. Some of the case studies put forward by André further develop and expand on perspectives already discussed in Blackness in Opera. This is the case, for example, of his valuable chapter on George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), a controversial opera about the life of an African-American community, which shows ties with certain stereotypes derived from Minstrel shows, but at the same time echoes the biographical experiences of Gershwin himself, who was also himself a victim – as the son of Jewish immigrants – of racial discrimination. Of particular interest and originality are the pages dedicated to the cinematographic remakes of Carmen, most notably Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954) and Mark Dornford-May’s U-Carmen (2005), which respectively place Bizet’s opera in the settings of North Carolina and Chicago, and in a slum of Cape Town. If the adaptation of Carmen Jones highlights the racist political issues underlying the film, that of U-Carmen offers instead an example of how the kind of exoticism, racism and machismo that Bizet’s Carmen is imbued with can be singled out and changed by the contribution of black performers and a setting that clearly refers to the tragedy of Apartheid in South Africa.
Giuliano Danieli holds a PhD in Musicology from King’s College London and is currently a postdoc researcher and lecturer at Sapienza University (Rome), specializing in the intersections between opera and cinema. He also works as a social media manager and videomaker at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma.
Calibano is the new magazine of the Rome Opera House. Created as a space for in-depth analysis and debate around topical issues raised from the performances on the theater’s program and realized in collaboration with the publishing house effequ, the editorial project involves, every four months, the publication and distribution in Italian bookstores of a monographic volume dedicated to an opera title and a related theme, through the commissioning of essays, short stories and reviews by authoritative signatures.
You can buy Calibano on the effequ website at this link, in bookstores and at the Rome Opera House shop.
*The cover image was created by Simone Ferrini, Ortica video e grafica, using a Text To Image software
